Nothing like a major global event to stimulate the “crap editorial” industry in China, and with the 2010 Expo around the corner (What? Oh, really? You hadn’t heard? Can’t imagine that!) the Shanghai Daily is cranking them out with astonishing energy.
Yesterday’s installment in “How the dung beetle turns crap and calls it writing” was called “Superpower Responsibilities” and after a luke-warm rehash of bad history, we come to this little turd nugget:
After the Roman Empire collapsed because of the massive migration of Germanic people, the spiritual legacies of its civilization were inherited by the succeeding European world. In comparison, even after the Chinese empire was conquered by other ethnic regimes, like the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, those ethnic groups were eventually assimilated into the Chinese civilization and subsequently became the driving forces that carried forward that civilization.
The Mongols were actually one of the worst examples of “assimilation,” maintaining very specific ethnic distinctions, most notably a caste system with Mongols on the top, Central Asians second, Northern Chinese third, and Southern Chinese at the very bottom. When Zhu Yuanzhang and the boys got around to toppling their rule in the 1360s, rather than simply fade